Apple's iPhone As A Contactless Payments Platform
Jim Bruene writes on his Financial Marketing blog about how Apple's iPhone could spur more mobile banking adoption - and adds his prediction that "within two years one of those buttons on the iPhone will activate contactless card payments via MasterCard, Visa, or American Express." We did a bit of our own speculation yesterday following Steve Jobs' keynote introduction of the new iPhone. On the other hand, given the price of the iPhone and Apple's own estimate that it hopes to take 1 percent mobile phone market share in 2008, the iPhone just isn't going to be a mass market device over the next couple of years.
I as big an Apple fanboy as they come -- I've already ordered by Apple TV for February delivery -- but this prediction is off the mark. At the 3GSM conference a year ago I saw Steve Ballmer's keynote which included waving around a Windows not-very-smartphone with an NFC interface, whereas Jobs keynote didn't even mention 3G, let alone NFC. Unless Apple are saving NFC to pull out of the bag at next year's Expo, then I'm not so sure about contactless Apple payments.
Posted by: Dave Birch | January 10, 2007 at 11:14 AM